


Dedication

by SvengoolieCat



Series: Sven's 007Fest 2018 [9]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: AUTHOR AU, Character Study, M/M, One-Shot, Prompt Fill, SPECTRE Fix-It, short fic, trashy spy thrillers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 23:22:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15497070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SvengoolieCat/pseuds/SvengoolieCat
Summary: Anon Prompt: Bond writes trashy spy thrillers on the side, under a pseudonym.





	Dedication

**Author's Note:**

> The companion moodboard is here: http://svengooliecat.tumblr.com/post/176455959151/anon-prompt-bond-is-an-author-who-writes-trashy

 

 

After Bond leaves at the end of the Spectre Incident, he has a lovely time with Madeleine Swann. However, all things too good to be true must end, so she leaves him and goes back to her life. Bond is...surprisingly okay with it. He’s got freedom, he’s got money from all his years as a double-oh, and he’s older now, and settled enough in himself now to want to do something meaningful with his time.

He doesn’t go home to London, England. He wants to, sometimes, but he’s unsure of his welcome. He’s burned his bridges, and he knows it. So, he does the one thing he never thought he would--he goes home to Scotland. Buys a nice flat in Glasgow, buys and assembles IKEA furniture and hangs his paintings on the walls, and damn if he doesn’t pick up a bit of the accent that he’d lost when he was young.

Bond’s always been a reader and a decent writer (when he got around to doing his reports) and it occurs to him one day while he’s in a secondhand bookshop, that he could probably write a better spy thriller than the one currently in his hand. He gives it a shot—after all, what does he have to lose? He picks a penname—James Hawkins—and writes a rough draft of  _Die Another Way_  featuring his hero, Ian Fleming. It takes him about three months, and then he shops it around to various agents willing to take a chance on him. One thing leads to another, and he’s published. He can walk by any major book retailer in the city and find his book on the New Author displays.

It’s a heady feeling. Bond didn’t expect much to happen, not really, but his first book sells well and then he’s got a contract for another two books. He writes  _The Spy Who Died Twice_ and  _Risk It All_ and by then he’s quite enjoying himself. He breaks into the Top 20 of the NYT Bestseller list and has a handful of ideas about more books. There are online fan-groups dedicated to his books—they love Cindy Nickel, the gorgeous and kickass assassin who sometimes partners Fleming on his missions. They go positively _wild_ writing steamy fanfic about Fleming and his toe-curling tension with his morally grey-hat frenemy hacker associate, the mysterious Merlin. Even the critics who are first in line to complain about hackneyed, melodramatic storylines, grudgingly admit that the novels’ characters are lively and brilliant.

The nature of his former profession means that he can’t do the press tours but maintains a tight veil of secrecy over his identity. Not surprisingly, people eat it up and it only increases the reading public’s fascination with the books. He puts out two a year. They’re fast to write, fast to read, and fun is had by one and all. They help him allay homesickness and keep him from missing the people he left behind too sharply, and most of the time it works. Sometimes, oh sometimes, when he's writing he becomes 007 again, saving the world with Q muttering murderous sweet nothings in his ear about the terrible retribution he would demand if Bond doesn’t bring his gun back this time, while M bitches at him from on high, and Moneypenny tells him to get his head out of his arse or she’ll shoot him there next.

That sharp feeling of longing—saudade, according to the dictionary—makes him do something reckless before sending in the last draft of his fourth novel. For the first time, he writes a dedication. It’s stupid, it’s desperate, but he does it and emails the manuscript back to his editor before he has time to think too hard. That’s the first night in years that Bond gets blindingly drunk.

Some time later, in London, Q gets home from a 14-hour day from hell to find a package from Amazon waiting for him. It contains a pre-ordered book entitled _Tempus Fugit_ , the fourth in an ongoing series. It’s a guilty pleasure of his, this ridiculous spy thriller. But hey, it has great female characters, realistic spy techniques buried in all the sensationalism, a devious hacker who can't decide whether he wants the hero dead or in his bed, and a hero who is unrepentantly bisexual. What’s not to like?

Q forgets all of that when he sees the dedication—and he has no doubt it’s addressed to him. What was that Bond had said after Q injected the Smart Blood? _I’ll send you a postcard?_

“Oh,” he breathes, staring at the words until his eyes hurt. “Oh, _you bastard_. I’m going to find you and I’m going to kill you, right after I yell at you for about twenty years.”

 Dear reader, Q does two of three of those things. 

 

 


End file.
